"The press, television, and movies make heroes of vandals by calling them whiz kids. ... There is obviously a cultural…"

"I've seen [visual] editors like that, but I don't feel a need for them. I don't want to see the state of the file whe…"

"Ken Thompson was once asked what he would do differently if he were redesigning the UNIX system. His reply: "I'd spel…"

"grep was a private command of mine for quite a while before i made it public."

"When in doubt, use brute force."

"Unix was built for me. I didn't build it as an operating system for other people, I built it to do games, and to do m…"

"We have persistent objects, they're called files."

"If you want to go somewhere, goto is the best way to get there."

"The X server has to be the biggest program I've ever seen that doesn't do anything for you."

"You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people lik…"